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“...AMERICAN GYPSIES
By ALBERT THOMAS SINCLAIR
EDITED FROM MANUSCRIPTS IN THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY WITH ADDITIONS
By GEORGE F. BLACK, Ph.D.
THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY
1917...”
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“...mcr tute.” (Do
not drink whiskey again, whiskey will kill you.) His big, black, shining Gypsy
eyes caught mine for a moment, and seemed to look through me. He simply
answered, holding out his big hand, miro puro romani pral, her vastas (“my
old Gypsy brother, shake hands”), and he has not touched tato pani since.
Most of the English Gypsies have wandered all over the United States
and Canada. One woman, who sometimes winters in Allston, was born
1 This vocabulary, with additions from other manuscripts of Mr. Sinclair, was published as “An
American-Romani Vocabulary” in the Bulletin of The New York Public Library, v. 19, p. 727-738. New
York, 1915. — G. F. B....”
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“...tion of a few scholars, chief of whom is Dr. John Sampson, librarian of the
University Library, Liverpool. The first to draw attention to it was the late
Charles Godfrey Leland, who collected a number of words and sentences from
an English vagrant at Aberystwith, in North Wales, and from an Irish tinker
in Philadelphia {The Gypsies, Boston, 1881, p. 354-372). The language
is based on old Irish of from one thousand to fifteen hundred years ago.
Numerous references to it occur in early Irish manuscripts, and it has been
1 The suffix -en, here and in diken and kiiren, further down in the list, is simply the English termina-
tion -ing.
2 The j here and in jins is the s in vulgar English “I wants.”...”
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